Powerful ideas, practical actions

Rebecca Adamson offers Native American views on scarcity, Wall Street, and how to thrive in hard times.

Indigenous peoples have known hard times. There are signs of drought, crop failure, and forced migration over the millennia, and of course these peoples survived centuries of colonialism. When we were looking for some wisdom on building a new economy, I immediately thought of Rebecca Adamson. Native peoples have developed societies that function within ecological limits and counter the tendency of societies to polarize between rich and poor, powerful and excluded. Adamson, a Cherokee, is founder of First Nations Development Institute and First Peoples Worldwide. She works globally with grassroots tribal communities, sits on the boards of the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Calvert Social Investment Fund, and is an advisor to the United Nations on rural development.

Sarah: When you look ahead at the coming months, perhaps years, of economic downturn, what do you see coming, and what does indigenous experience teach us about what we should be doing?

Rebecca: I’ve gotta say, it’s about time the bubbles burst. I don’t want to see anybody without a home or a job, but Wall Street had to come to reality sooner or later. I just wish they were taking the brunt of it instead of Main Street.

President Obama assumes that through more spending we can stimulate the financial sector. But why would we want to save something that had no productivity for human life? Until we move away from that paradigm, I don’t hold out too much optimism for the next months, or the next years, or even the next seven generations.

What indigenous experience tells us is that an economy is about fairness and equity. It should be for the well-being of your people and the sacredness of creation. You take care of your place because it provides for you. And the place provides for you because you’re protecting it. We have to begin to rethink our economic system so that it’s accountable for our place.

Sarah: So what is an economy for?

Rebecca: The economy used to be about livelihoods and the provision of a household, but we’ve lost that purpose. We have created an economic system with a goal of material wealth, rather than human development.

We need an economy that provides for people. It has to be fundamentally, radically brought back into control and harnessed for the well-being of society. Not for making money, but for making dignified livelihoods and for the betterment of community.

Sarah: It seems to me that there’s a tendency in any society for wealth to concentrate—if you have a little bit more than someone else, you can use that little bit of additional power to get even more than others. How do indigenous societies counter that?

Rebecca: An indigenous system is based on prosperity, creation, kinship, and a sense of enough-ness. It is designed for sharing. Potlatches, give-aways—these involve deliberately accumulating wealth as a person or as a family or as a clan for the sole purpose of giving it away. The potlatch or the give-away takes place at very specific times of life—birth, naming ceremonies, puberty. Often, if you receive a gift during a potlatch, you are then obligated, at some point in the future, to give a gift. That puts in motion a continual, ongoing requirement for redistribution.

Sarah: So someone with very high status can’t accumulate too much wealth?

Rebecca: You can’t get high status unless you give gifts. Here’s an example. We just got back from a visit with the James Bay Cree. I learned there that the very first ceremony that a baby undertakes is called a walk-away ceremony. James Bay is very cold and so the baby’s first days of life are spent inside the lodge.

Once the baby takes his first steps, they prepare for a walk-away ceremony. A hide is tanned, and an elaborate outfit is made for the baby to wear as he takes his first steps away from the lodge. The baby’s family and the clan gather outside. The baby walks away from the lodge as far as he can. Then everybody calls the baby back in. The child is carrying a bundle filled with food. He comes back into the circle of the family and the clan, and then goes from person to person sharing the food. By doing this, a child has learned to both become his own person and to come back to share.

Source: The New Green Economy

The New Green Economy

For over half a century now, linear product life cycles have dominated the marketplace and come to define the value sets that characterize modern economics.  The average consumer has unwittingly invested untold amounts of time, energy, and income to ensure that the Materials Economy remains a driving force throughout cultures around the world.  Product marketing incessantly bombards consumers in an effort to dupe them into believing that happiness and peace of mind are to be found in the latest product trends.

An April 2009 article published on The New Green Economy, entitled Transforming the Materials Economy, examined the outright unsustainability of the Materials Economy.  The article aimed to promulgate the devastating impact that linear product life cycles have had on the both natural and built environments, as well as the bleak future they may lay ahead if these cycles are not radically modified to mirror the circular life cycles as found in the natural world.

Source: The New Green Economy

To some it’s just a single day. But to us, 21 September is a 24 hour-long platform for life-saving activities around the world and an opportunity for individuals – particularly young people – to become involved in the peace process.  21 September is the UN International Day of Peace, a day of global ceasefire and non-violence: Peace Day.

By 2007, the UN estimated that over 100 million people from all walks of life actively supported Peace Day around the world. That same year, Peace One Day was instrumental in securing the conditions by which mass polio vaccinations could be carried out in Afghanistan on Peace Day; 1.4 million children were vaccinated in some of the most remote areas of the country. And in 2008, an additional 1.6 million were treated. That’s an estimated 3 million children in Afghanistan alone – on Peace Day.

Afghanistan

On Peace Day 2008 in Afghanistan the United Nations Department for Safety and Security, which monitors security related incidents, recorded a 70 per cent reduction in violent incidents on the day itself.

“My experience of conflict is that those who are involved in it long for even a day of peace. To have a day of cessation of violence, that to me is an idea whose time has come.” Mary Robinson, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from a filmed meeting with Jeremy Gilley

Source: Peace one day

Copenhagen

From what I can tell, not a few companies are a tad upset about political developments over the past week that suggest major world leaders are basically ready to renege on their promise to work toward halving global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

I mean, here they are (at least some businesses) busting their own business models to figure out how to live up to the industrial end of the bargain while the politicians are defaulting to be political all over again heading into COP-15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18.

Source: Smart Planet

The credit crisis could spark a rise in oil prices

Here’s the bad news about the global recession’s potentially coming to an end: the recovery could spark a massive energy crisis with increased demand for fossil fuels from China and other developing countries, tighter oil supplies and skyrocketing oil prices. And this is just in the near future. The longer-term picture looks even more daunting. If the world continues to guzzle oil and gas at its present pace, global temperatures will rise by an average of 6°C by 2030, causing “irreparable damage to the planet.”